Delicious Food

About two weeks ago I got together with two of my Japanese friends. My friend Toshiko taught me how to cook five Japanese side dishes. We made dashimakitamago (the egg thing), miso soup, harusamesunomono (clear noodle salad), horensounogomaae (spinach and sesame dish), and kyuurigomaae (cucumber sesame salad). I really enjoyed making all the food that I decided to by a Japanese cookbook. This way I can continue to study Japanese and eat delicious food when I'm back in the US. Here we are with the food:
(check out the necklace, Mary!)

In the same day I went to the motor boat races with my friend Makiko and her husband. Makiko got her PhD in counseling in Missouri and counsels students at two of my schools. Anyways, we went to the boat races here in Naruto, but it was an away-race, so we were still able to bet, but weren't able to see the races in person. We bet on one race, lost, and left. It was interesting to see how it's done, but not so thrilling. Makiko's and her husband were interesting to learn about what kind of races are gambled on in the US. So I told them about horse, dog, and pig races!

Instead of wasting our money on the away-races, we went out for a really really nice lunch at a famous sushi/seafood restaurant in Naruto called Arashi. We saw the chefs pull out the fish/sea creatures from the huge fishtanks in the front before they brought us our meal! It can't get any fresher than that! ...or can it? I had thinly sliced raw squid with it's tentacles fried tempura-style:
It's meals like this that make me wonder how THE US got stuck with the "huge portions" stereotype. I could barely finish this meal! Here's Makiko and her husband:

I always enjoy hanging out with Makiko because she is fluent, so our conversations get much farther along, and she's able to tell me really interesting things about Japan. She told me that some restaurants will serve squid or octopus completely raw... as in, still alive. And people eat it with the tentacles still writhing about! The only time I've seen this is in the Korean movie "Old Boy." She also told me that somewhere in Japan you can order a special eel and tofu meal. The eel is still alive on the plate when it's served. Then the eel is lit on fire! It gets scared and runs right into the tofu, getting itself stuck in the middle. Then you eat the tofu with the eel "cooked" inside! That's probably the craziest food story I've ever heard.

Makiko is pregnant, so I've learned a few interesting tidbits about childbirth in Japan. Initially she told me that Japanese women are usually pregnant for 10 months when they have a baby. At first I was like, "How can that possibly be?? Are Japanese people actually a different species???" But as it turns out, they just begin the count from the woman's last period. She also told me that they don't know the sex of the baby (too early to tell, or it's a girl) yet, but even if they did, they wouldn't pick out a name ahead of time. She said that it is customary to take the baby to a name fortune-teller-like person after he or she is born. The specialist takes the number of strokes in the family's last name and the date of the baby's birth into account and comes up with a number. That number deciphers the stroke order (number of strokes) in the kanji character (Chinese character) of the baby's name. Once the parents have that stroke order number, they choose a name out of a list of kanji characters with the same number of strokes.